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Transitioning to a post-peak oil world
Daniel Terdiman, CNET
... At the heart of the so-called Transition movement, Brownlee explained, is a concept called re-localization. Because a massive spike in the cost of fossil fuel-based energy would drastically change most of our systems--food, energy, economy, employment, and so on--re-localization imagines a new era in which local communities work to meet their own needs rather than depending on a global infrastructure.

In May 2008, the folks at Transition Boulder County became officially affiliated with the movement, and launched the first such initiative in North America. Today, Brownlee said, there are 31 such efforts going on in the United States. And as Transition Boulder expanded its reach beyond the city and then county of Boulder, it began to get involved in Denver and other places in Colorado. Two weeks ago, Brownlee said, the organization's board decided to change its name to Transition Colorado, becoming the first statewide hub in the country.

Now the movement is picking up steam across the United States, and Transition United States is just getting off the ground.

... Without preparation, proponents of the movement argue, the world is likely to experience a series of "whiplash" cycles, in which energy prices spike, causing food prices to go up, which is then followed by economic distress that leads the prices to drop. And then repeat, again and again, each time getting worse.

The short-term answer, they say, is to begin raising awareness in as many communities as possible. For example, Brownlee said that one of the efforts Transition Boulder County has undertaken has been a series of classes offered to the local community teaching what he called "The Great Re-skilling." This is, essentially, a teaching of the kinds of self-sufficiency skills our grandparents had, but which have been progressively lost as society moved away from the kind of do-it-yourself ethos that has been so prevalent in the past.

Among the skills being taught are food cultivation, construction, the making and repair of clothing, keeping bees, and much more. These kinds of skills could be crucial for people to have if global supply chains were to break down.

... But the good thing, he said, is that he's never seen a grass-roots movement spread at the pace he's seen with Transition. While most of the organizations have sprouted in small towns, there are currently efforts under way in cities like Denver and Los Angeles. However, in cities, he said, it is likely that work will have to be done at the community level and coordinated city-wide, rather than be driven by a top-down structure.
(24 June 2009)

What Can Happen When a Transition Initiative and its Local Government Work Together: the Stroud Story
Simon Allen and Cllr. Fi Macmillan, Transition Culture
... A couple of months ago I attended the IDEA conference in Liverpool. The delegates came from local authorities across England, and the first morning of the event was designed to look at Transition. I spoke first, and gave a general overview of it, and then Simon Allen of Transition Stroud and Cllr. Fi Macmillan of Stroud District Council (see left) spoke. They told the story, as a scripted dialogue, of how Transition Stroud and the Council forged a very productive working relationship. It was a fascinating 20 minutes, and I asked Simon if I could post their script here, so here it is ... - Rob Hopkins

... Simon opens:
Our story is one where you don’t need big budgets. You don’t need grand plans. You don’t even need member buy-in to get started. What you do need is energy, commitment and ideas. Let’s tell you how we did it. In our story there are three players. I’m Simon Allen of Transition Stroud’s Local Government Group.

Fi speaks:
I’m Fi Macmillan, also of Transition Stroud’s Local Government Group. And first I need to introduce you to our third player, Nigel Riglar, no 2 at Stroud District Council. He can’t be here so we’re telling his story.

We are here to show you why you want to work with Transition. And we’re going to do this in three stages –

* First we are going to tell you how we developed the relationship in Stroud
* Second we are going to describe the joint work we have done
* Third we’ll give you some top tips about making this happen.
(24 June 2009)

A Look at Peak Oil Preparation Plans from Around the World
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
... As part of the Totnes research, I have had a good rummage around, helped by the excellent Post Carbon Cities website, at peak oil plans developed thus far around the world. It has been a fascinating process, seeing what’s out there, so I thought I would share it with you. Here is the round up of the plans I have managed to find, whether developed by community groups, local authorities or national government.

One of the first such plans was the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan, developed in 2005 by students at Kinsale Further Education College, which was partly responsible for the formation of the Transition concept. Frustrated at looking around the world for examples of communities taking proactive responses to the peak oil challenge, it set out to see how the town could make the move away from its oil dependency, seeing a huge potential opportunity in these inevitable changes.

The Kinsale report became a viral phenomenon, being downloaded many thousands of times. In spite of just being a student project, it seemed to capture something that other people had also been thinking about. Subsequent plans that relate to responses to peak oil have fallen into four categories. There are those that are local government-led, those that explore the wider impacts of peak oil on society, those that look at solutions in a wider context, mostly national ‘power down’ style responses, and finally there are those which are community driven relocalisation plans, known also as ‘Energy Descent Action Plans’.

Local Government-led Plans

The vast majority of these have emerged from the US. The first was produced July 2007 in Portland, Oregon, and was entitled ‘Descending the Oil Peak: navigating the Transition from Oil and Natural Gas’, produced by the Portland Peak Oil Task Force . This was a very thorough plan which looked at many aspects of life in the area and how they could be prepared for the end of cheap oil. This was followed by a similar plan for Oakland, “The Oil Independent Oakland Action Plan” , and then in June 2008 the “Vision Plan for the City of San Buenaventura”.
(23 June 2009)

Thinking Local Part I: Bringing the Sheep Back
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
Note: This is the first in an intermittent series of posts on my bioregion, and how it might create sustainable industries and a viable long term economy. All of us are going to have to figure out how to create local economies where we are - we’re going to need the jobs, we’re going to need the goods, we’re going to need to think about the long term as we do it. These are my musings on how New England and Northern NY might begin to adapt. I hope others will consider how this might work in their region, and link to their considerations in comments.

In the early 19th century, the northeast was dotted with sheep farms. In 1809, Thomas Jefferson appointed William Jarvis as ambassador to Spain, where Jarvis met the Merino. For those of you who are not fiber-aware, Merino is the softest wool out there, often wearable by people who think they can’t wear wool - there is nothing scratchy about it.

Jarvis imported 15,000 sheep into New England, and their wool sold at a shocking (inflation adjusted) $100lb. The old stone walls that wander through second growth woodlands and along old homesteads in the Northeast often kept in flocks of sheep, and many of the old farmhouses were built with sheep money.

In the late 1830s, however, the sheep industry began to collapse. All animal agriculture has boom and bust cycles - the Merino sheep was the alpaca of its day, starting out selling for high prices, but the very reality that animals reproduce themselves means that those extremely high prices can never last.

... If the Northeast is to gradually transition to sustainable agriculture again, it will have to be done carefully, wisely and with an eye to the longer term. That means drawing gently on our strengths - coppice wood for home heating, sugar maples (although with climate change I fear sugar maples may not be a multi-generational investment for most farms), dairy, potato and root production and other things that do well in our climate, with our soils. Sheep, and a wood industry are potentially a part of this project - not all of it - I would not wish us to return to the boom and bust cycle of the 19th century. But a piece of a larger, deeper project - bringing the farms back east.
(24 June 2009)

Recession generation? Young adults brace for simpler lifestyle
Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
... The Millennial generation, or Gen Y, ranges from people in their 20s to those still in grade school. But what they all have in common is the knowledge that the recession has in some way shattered the world they thought they knew. And, depending upon how long the downturn lasts, historians, economists and psychologists say it could shape Millennials' values and attitudes in much the same way the Depression shaped the attitudes of those growing up in the 1930s.

"I call it the end of Disney World," says Michael Bradley, an adolescent psychologist in suburban Philadelphia. But now, young people are reordering their values.

"It is their version of the American Dream," he says. "They talk more about having autonomy and freedom, and in so doing, not being as enslaved to material goals that they perceived their parents being caught up in. They do talk about life happiness not based on economic success or achievement as much."

... The virtues of simple living now coming into vogue especially strike a chord with Millennials, whom pollster John Zogby describes as more socially conscious, environmentally aware and demanding as consumers than previous generations.
(24 June 2009)

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